by Stacy Schiff
Nowhere is the difference between Terre des hommes and Wind, Sand and Stars more obvious than in the book’s titles. Reynal and Hitchcock settled quickly on theirs, four words borrowed from the description of the enchanted desert evening Saint-Exupéry, Riguelle, Bourgat, et al. had spent outside Cape Barbas with their uncooperative Breguet 14’s. The Americans were eager to publish a concrete text, not a philosophical treatise; the very name Terre des hommes made them tremble with fear before the book-buying public. Probably this emphasis on story accounts for the omission in the English-language edition of the four paragraphs that preface the French and read as a sort of personal manifesto. Borrowed from a 1937 eulogy to Mermoz, they establish Saint-Exupéry as a kind of anti-intellectual and a humanist of the first order, more Pascal than Conrad: “The earth teaches us more about ourselves than do all the books. Because it resists us. Man discovers himself when he measures himself against the obstacle. But to do so he needs a tool, a saw, or a plow. The farmer, in his labor, slowly coaxes out a few of nature’s secrets, and the truths he unearths are universal. In the same way the airplane, tool of the airlines, involves man in all the old problems.” There is more room in France for moralisme and at the time there was certainly more reason to indulge in it; Europe in 1939 was far more message-hungry than America. Room was found in the English edition for mysticism—at Galantière’s suggestion Saint-Exupéry added a kind of apologia for the machine, called “The Tool,” of which only a skeletal version appears in the French edition—but generally an attempt was made to rein in his meditations, to see that Wind, Sand and Stars remained first and foremost a book about flying. Saint-Exupéry thought of it as much more, as is obvious from his long search for a French title. This culminated in an offer he made his cousin André de Fonscolombe: 100 francs for a perfect title. Fonscolombe drew up a list of thirty possibilities, from which, one evening, on the rue Michel-Ange, Terre des humains emerged as the front-runner. On the proofs of the French edition, printed in mid-December 1938, the title Étoiles par grand vent has been crossed out and Terre des hommes substituted in Saint-Exupéry’s hand. The proofs are dotted with additional minute corrections, and the author continued even at this point to add new pages of text, which were further revised. When he cabled from New York in 1939 to ask that his new chapter on the cyclone be included as well the book was already on press, and he received from Gallimard an answer he was not used to hearing.
This was pure Saint-Exupéry. The Prix Fémina laureate of 1931 had had eight years to produce his next book, and yet the manuscript had very nearly to be physically torn from him as deadlines came and went. In the end Wind, Sand and Stars came into being rather suddenly; it was not a book written over the course of eight years, but a book into which eight years of writing were hurriedly stitched. Much though it represents the wide range of his thinking it is not a volume he mulled over for years, the way, for example, Twain composed his account of piloting on the Mississippi. Richer in passion than in ambition, Saint-Exupéry’s was not—either on the page or in the air—a life by design. He had never actually courted adventure; his post-1931 flying amounted less to adventure than to restlessness. In French aviation circles before the war one tended to smile in speaking of him as a great pilot, a distinction for which he did not seem to possess the requisite attention. When he earned accolades they were less often for his expertise or audacity than for his finesse, a double-edged word, implying as it does a special sort of adroitness. In his most famous act of valor he had staggered for four days through the Libyan desert, but he had done so in unlucky pursuit of 150,000 francs of prize money. The book that would earn him the reputation as the Conrad of the skies, Wind, Sand and Stars came about not because Saint-Exupéry had planned the volume for years, or even because he was one day struck by the idea for it. It was a work of expedience, to which his convalescence had contributed.
A sort of Saint-Exupéry omnibus conceived and shaped by publisher and translator (and possibly by Gide, depending on when he mentioned Mirror of the Sea to its author), everything went into Wind, Sand and Stars: the Saharan flights and crashes; the South American flights and near-crashes; the Libyan adventure; Guillaumet in the Andes; the enchanted evenings with the Fuchs family, with the Nouakchott sergeant, with Néri, with the Aéropostale crew in mid-desert; the story of Bark the Senegalese slave; the Paris-Soir reportages, even the eulogies to Mermoz. Combined—with a dash of mysticism and a generous sprinkling of hymns to fraternity—those writings make for some of the most glorious descriptions of flight ever published. Proof that a writer and his books may go their separate ways, nothing about these very personal pages hints at the circumstances behind them however. Wind, Sand and Stars reads as a hugely intimate work—women fell for its author over and over after reading it—but a very good deal of Saint-Exupéry gets left out of a volume we would classify today as a memoir or personal essay. Nothing about this humane book so bursting with heroism and innocence suggests that it was written out of dire financial necessity by a man with an exhausting sentimental life, who had not flown a mail route in eight years and was never again to pilot an airplane in peacetime.
XIV
~
Where Is France?
1939–1940
So foul a sky clears not without a storm:
Pour down thy weather: how goes all in France?
SHAKESPEARE, King John
Gallimard published Terre des hommes on March 3, 1939. Newly returned from New York, Saint-Exupéry submitted to his first related interview on the rue Michel-Ange at the end of February. Fortified by whiskey and nicotine, doodling as he spoke, he expounded on a number of themes; his visitor, from Les Nouvelles Littéraires, was not the first person to remark, respectfully, that he felt as if he were in a lecture hall at Sciences Po. Others as well were eager to engage in such conversation with the author, who that month traveled to Germany, where plans to bring out a translation of the book were under way. As skeptical of anti-Nazi propaganda as he was of any propaganda, he drove to Berlin with Madame de B in her Chrysler during the second week of March; he wanted to see for himself what was happening with France’s neighbor. The first reviews of Terre des hommes appeared in his absence.
It was at once apparent that there was, in Germany, cause for concern. Saint-Exupéry was awakened in a small Bavarian town by a middle-of-the-night military convoy clanking its way through the streets; from a table in a Nuremberg beer hall he watched as a group of Hitler Youth marched by, hailed on all sides. In Berlin he met with Otto Abetz, who was then in the business of courting well-placed Frenchmen with Nazi doctrine, and who took the writer on a tour of the capital. Saint-Exupéry asked to see an art exhibition and found he had company for this visit as well. “Curious,” he remarked, “how totalitarian countries always prefer guided tours!” Abetz proposed an excursion into Pomerania, where one of the country’s three elite Führerschulen was located. Madame de B stayed in Berlin, but another visiting French writer, Henry Bordeaux, joined Saint-Exupéry for the trip. It was unsettling; later he was to tell Raoul de Roussy de Sales that he had expected to find in the Führerschule a nursery for the elite but had instead toured a school for sergeants. In a library bursting with volumes the Frenchmen asked the school’s director if the leaders-in-training were permitted to read, say, Marx and Comte. They were indeed, reported the director, so long as they did not find in those volumes any objections to National Socialism, in which event they were expelled. With a smile the German assured his visitors there was no cause for concern; this never happened. Saint-Exupéry was indignant, as he was at another point during the week when he asked a group of German physicists the obvious question—were they allowed to read Einstein?—and got the obvious answer. Back in the car he was direct with Abetz: “The kind of man you are creating does not interest me.” It was one thing for Hitler to pose as the new Mohammed, another for him to outlaw a free exchange of ideas. Abetz spent the long ride to Berlin summoning argument after argument in a vain attempt to s
way his opinion, a conversation that may indeed have resembled one from the hallways of Sciences Po.
On March 15, in direct violation of the guarantee given at Munich the previous fall, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Fearing that the borders might be closed at any moment, Saint-Exupéry and Bordeaux packed earlier than they had intended. On the morning of the eighteenth Saint-Exupéry drove back into France, stopping along the road at regular intervals to call Pélissier, who was staying in his apartment, to ask him to wait for him for lunch, a meal he successfully delayed until four in the afternoon. They have so many airplanes, he told his friend on arriving, that they have no hangars for them, and this can only mean one thing. Raoul de Roussy de Sales was later to say that Saint-Exupéry’s was “a philosophical analysis of Nazism”; he returned to France convinced of the impossibility of reaching an understanding of any kind with Germany’s leaders, whose agendas went far beyond the political. He had not seen all he had wanted to see, and he had not met with any high-ranking officers, but he was certain that there was to be no such thing as a lasting peace with a Nazi regime. (Clearly he was not alone in this thinking: on April 1 the French army was partly mobilized; as of that date the French press was censored.) Saint-Exupéry’s discomfort with fascism could be mutual. The first review of Terre des hommes appeared in L’Action Française, the formerly Royalist newspaper cited that month as Germany’s best friend among the French press. The notice was unflattering. Robert Brasillach thought Saint-Exupéry’s cult of the individual smacked of anarchism and felt the volume overwritten, fair charges both, but neither of them enough to derail a master storyteller, or even enough to cost him a great number of right-wing admirers.
Generally Terre des hommes either made poets of its reviewers or drove them to hyperbole. “This volume is put together with rigor, with an evenness and a dignity that evoke fierce admiration. This universe in which danger, anguish, fear, and death must constantly be surmounted is described with a total lack of theatrics, without affect. No word seems to me better to characterize this work than modesty, which is, as we know, both a virtue in the world of heroics and a secret of literary effectiveness,” wrote Sartre’s great friend Paul Nizan in Ce Soir. “Saint-Exupéry, aviator and moralist, is blessed with a sumptuous and refined talent. The most striking images and passages of the most exquisite style abound in his work. Since the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, I do not know if anyone has so skillfully coaxed poetry out of prose,” declared André Thérive in Le Temps. Edmond Jaloux placed Saint-Exupéry squarely in two traditions, evoking the names of Plutarch and Emerson on the one hand and Columbus and Magellan on the other.
In America, Wind, Sand and Stars was hailed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review as “a beautiful book, and a brave book, and a book that should be read against the confusion of this world, if only that we may retain our pride in humanity and our excitement in this modern age.” Launched with fanfare by Reynal & Hitchcock, it was reviewed as well on the June covers of The Saturday Review and the New York Herald Tribune Books section, and quickly became a best-seller. “To read it is to forget we are earthbound,” raved the Atlantic reviewer, who like several American critics knew little of Saint-Exupéry but made of him a quick study, describing the book’s “contrasting moods of loneliness and human warmth, of exhilaration and the merciless exposure of nerves and sanity.” (Many of Saint-Exupéry’s friends would have howled with laughter had they read the Herald Tribune review, in which Ben Ray Redman, noting the author’s quibble that most men are half-asleep in their lives, wrote, “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is awake and would awaken others.”) In October, a month after war had been declared, Wind, Sand and Stars read just as well in London, where The Spectator’s reviewer was struck by Saint-Exupéry’s “God-like tolerance for the pettiness and folly of mankind.” “He touches nothing which he does not illuminate,” wrote the Times Literary Supplement’s critic of this book of “visions and dreams,” rarely described in any country as anything less than a “hymn,” a “poem,” an “adventure in prose,” or a “rhapsody.” The fan mail poured in, from such disparate admirers as Le Corbusier and King Leopold of Belgium.
Otto Abetz perhaps did the most for the book. The German propagandist had put Saint-Exupéry and Bordeaux together for the visit to Pomerania, during which the sixty-nine-year-old Bordeaux could not have helped but succumb to the force of the younger writer’s personality. Probably on his return he read Terre des hommes, an experience he compared to a first hearing of Le Cid or a first reading of Descartes. He was overwhelmed by the freshness of Saint-Exupéry’s vision; the author of a life of Guynemer and a veteran of World War I, Bordeaux was as close to a natural fan as Saint-Exupéry could have hoped for. He, too, had a particule; a member of the elite of France’s elites, his name appeared in print always followed by “de l’Académie Française.” Without notifying its author, Bordeaux presented Terre des hommes to the Académie as a candidate for the Grand Prix du Roman, the first literary prize awarded each year. He had his work cut out for him; such decisions are as hotly contested in France as anywhere on earth, and Terre was not a novel. Fortunately for Saint-Exupéry there were few obvious choices among the books of fiction published in 1939 (the Goncourt went to another Gallimard author, Philippe Hériat), and Bordeaux was a talented debater. He challenged the Académie members to name a fiction writer who could match Saint-Exupéry’s style. But there is no plot in the book, protested several of the other thirty-nine Immortals, to which argument Bordeaux countered, Does the human condition have a plot? The characters put in only fleeting appearances, noted someone else. It was true that the characters did little more than appear and disappear from the stage, Bordeaux conceded, but what magnificent entrances and exits they made! The debate, which Bordeaux had thought settled, flared up again unexpectedly just before the Académie cast its votes, but Bordeaux prevailed, and on Thursday, May 25, Terre des hommes was awarded the 1939 Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française.
Saint-Exupéry could not have been more surprised by the news. In this he was not alone. The candidates for France’s literary awards are generally well-known in advance, but the first reporter sent off to interview the Académie’s new laureate—he arrived on the rue Michel-Ange at six that evening and was let in by Boris, formerly of the place Vauban—had not read the book. Understandably, he was under the impression that Terre des hommes was a novel. He found an apartment in which no one appeared to live and discovered that his subject was a difficult one. “His timidity intimidated,” recalled Luc Estang. The Figaro Littéraire reporter had the same experience the following day: “Interviewing Monsieur Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is no easy feat. His modesty, his distaste for talking about himself, the near timidity of this big man, put an end to questions. They all seem pointless in the presence of someone whom one knows and senses to be accustomed to long meditations, who is at home with the dramas of the heavens and yet who stands so solidly on the earth.” He made some headway with his subject, however, eliciting answers delivered with the aplomb one would expect from an author who claimed to want to throw out lifelines among men. Your books give us faith in humanity, the reporter told Saint-Exupéry. “I have much faith in man,” responded the writer, “because I have only ever met agreeable men. There is an agreeable man in everyone, it goes along with the disagreeable. The mistake made by many is to address themselves stubbornly to the latter.” From Saint-Exupéry’s magnanimity his interviewer concluded that he had founded his ideas about humanity on the men he met through aviation and not through literature.
Everyone drew the same picture of an awkward, balding giant with a round face and a dreamy gaze, a retroussé nose that quivered when he talked excitedly, heavily lidded eyes that sparkled, then went flat. Saint-Exupéry conformed to their idea, as the Revue des Deux Mondes put it, of someone “on whom depend many fates,” an impression to which his height and name surely added. No one mentioned the visible scars, one of which yanked his left eyebrow up, leaving
a permanently quizzical expression on his face, the other of which pulled at his smile; he gave an impression of robust good health. He bore up well under the spotlight, never allowing his delight to melt into pride. The good news was celebrated with a couscous dinner at Consuelo’s apartment on the rue Barbet-de-Jouy, attended by a dozen or so friends, including Madeleine Goisot, the Werths, the Fernandezes, Jean Lucas, and Léon-Paul Fargue. Saint-Exupéry was exultant, singing and recounting for a long portion of the evening. No one in Paris was more feted this May than he, who made for such good copy, especially at a time when France was not herself feeling particularly rich in glory or chivalry. “The name ‘Saint-Exupéry’ is one of the few that duchesses and café waiters pronounce with equal admiration,” reported Les Nouvelles Littéraires. About the only discordant note sounded regarding Terre des hommes that spring came in the form of a telegram from Saigon. Simone de Saint-Exupéry cabled her brother that she had found a grammatical error in his text, a comment over which he was inconsolable.